Broadland Wineries has boosted its efficiency by replacing the company’s previous positive displacement pumps with MasoSine process pumps from Watson-Marlow Pumps Group. The outcome is that tanker offload times for juice have been cut by 50%, while the time for wine offloading has been cut by 25%.

Located in Norwich, Broadland Wineries was established in 1965 as an importer, maker and bottler of wines in both branded and own-label formats. The 100+ employee company offers a range that includes wines from both the new and old world, and it also ferments fruit wines, tonic wines, communion wines, mulled wines and perry. In total, Broadland processes around 28-35 million litres every year for customers that include many national supermarket chains.

Market trend

“The contract bottling market is changing, so we’re developing brands rather than just bottling for third parties,” says Engineering Projects Manager Bryan Tooke speaking about the market’s most notable current trend.

Broadland bring in wine by the tanker load, typically 24,000 litres at a time. The company’s previous Italian-built positive displacement pumps were ageing and proving slow at transferring the wine from the tankers. In addition, the pumps were struggling with the concentrated, high viscosity fruit juices also delivered to Broadland to help make certain wines.

“We cannot accept any damage to our wines or fruit juices,” says Mr Tooke. “Any ‘whisking’ effects created by pumping will introduce oxygen, which is detrimental. As a result, pump quality, performance and flow rate are vital. Our previous pumps were not coping well in terms of wine discharge speed. For some of the thicker syrups we would have to use them on reduced capacity, or deploy alternative pumps with very low capacity.”

Proven sine pumps

Changing to a centrifugal pump was ruled out due to the inherent risk of cavitation in the wine potentially affecting dissolved CO2 levels and the pump. Fortunately however, Mr Tooke was familiar with MasoSine process pump technology from a previous role at a food manufacturing company. The sinusoidal rotor design of MasoSine SPS pumps delivers a low shear, gentle pumping action that transfers delicate products safely without risk of degradation. As a result, he requested a trial of an SPS 400 sinusoidal pump. The results were little short of startling.

“We immediately saw a reduction in our tanker offload time for wine to 45 minutes – a process which previously took an hour,” says Mr Tooke. “For fruit juice the impact is even bigger – we can now decant in four hours, whereas before it could take a full day, particularly in cold weather.”

Broadland Wineries subsequently ordered two MasoSine 400 pumps which have now been running for 2½ years, serving different offload points at the site. Broadland Wineries has recently placed an order for a further MasoSine SPS 400 plus two EcoSine 40 pumps. These will be used within the factory, in transportation and manufacturing processes.

Replacement programme

“As our existing pump types age to the point where performance dips, we’ve decided to replace them all with MasoSine,” says Mr Tooke. “This will improve our efficiency and deliver more uniform capacity. We are a small company so we have to be careful with our investments, but this project involving the MasoSine pumps has proved highly successful and cost effective.”

Broadland Wineries is one of the fastest growing private 'food & drinks' companies in the UK, as featured in a recent survey carried out by The Grocer.